Month: June 2014

This summer we decided to experiment with kitchen scrap gardening. These are two celery scraps from the same package, each cut an inch from the root. We used organic because it’s more likely to grow.

On May 13, we put one in a shallow bowl of water and the other we dipped in rooting hormone and planted in an equal soil mix of presoaked peat, organic compost and citrus/cactus potting mix. We covered it with about a half-inch of the soil mix.

Celery Stumps

Celery needs a lot of nutrients and good drainage, so that’s what I came up with from the bags in my garage. I have no idea if that’s proper or not, but I needed something for container gardening. It gets too hot here to grow celery this time of year so it needs to stay on my windowsill to keep it from bolting and turning bitter.

I didn’t think the one put in the soil was going to make it at first because the other one had an inch of leaves in a week, but it looks like the one planted in the soil was putting its initial energy into making roots because it really took off. On the other hand, the articles I read on rooting celery said you should see roots in a week if you put it in a bowl. We decided to give up waiting and gave it some rooting hormone and soil. Hopefully we’re not too late.

This is how they looked June 4.

Celery stumps three weeks later.

In theory, if they don’t bolt, you can cut off what you need when you want to eat it, or you can cut off the tops and bury the stumps in a little soil and start over again indefinitely. We may try blanching them with tubes of construction paper later.

The challenge was to make a robot from a cardboard tube and recycled materials. This is a scratched CD, pieces from a magazine, electrical cord from a rewiring project, aluminum foil and part of a small, plastic bottle.

We added googly eyes and a glow stick, and there are stars punched in its chassis. He didn’t have to be reading, we just thought it would be cute.

Sagan has been counting up to 79 the past few days and, as always, doing well sorting by category. I can hardly wait until he’s old enough to be let loose in the garage. (I’m not born organized.)

After reading me all the numbers on a measuring tape this morning, we decided to build the Samurai X Lego kit (400+ pieces).

You can use any Lego kit. We used this one because Sagan’s favorite Ninjago character is Nya. (She built her own exosuit.) Also because it was marked down from $35 to $20, heh.

The Lego Kit booklets require and reinforce the number line and sequential tasks. I had him read the number for each step before beginning.

He put together the minifigs and their accessories himself first.

After sorting the pieces by color and/or size in a sectioned tray (an egg carton would work), I demonstrated the first few pages of the next steps while he counted them for me.

Here he told me it was step 15, and I asked him to look for gray squares with spheres and beige trapezoids. He put the bigger pieces together and I did the smaller ones.

Here we needed a red rectangle with two holes. I had him read “2x” and explained it meant “two pieces”. From this point on he also started saying how many pieces we needed and pulled them all out before putting them together.

Some pieces are easier than others,

but here he learned “right angle” as it applies to manipulatives, and decided himself that the other piece looked like a red sled.